There is often an assumption running quietly through much of how Nonviolent Communication is practiced, including how Rachelle practiced it when she first encountered the work 27 years ago. It is the unspoken assumption that our needs are above questioning.

In 27 years of working with NVC, in her own life and with others, she has found it useful to challenge that assumption. Human beings, after all, are not simple creatures. We contain competing impulses, layered histories, and contradictory desires. We can name a need from the very part of us most committed to preventing its fulfillment. We can want change desperately while remaining, at a deeper level, committed to the status quo.

In this episode, Rachelle explores the part of us that would prefer things to stay as they are and distorts our needs. She invites us to seriously consider that needs are not the Holy Grail but rather a starting point. The real work begins when we're willing to look honestly at what's underneath them.

Referenced in this episode:

• John Gottman — perpetual problems in relationships (approximately 69%)

• James Hillman — Jungian depth psychology

• Marion Woodman — Jungian psychotherapy

• Clarissa Pinkola Estés — Women Who Run with the Wolves

• Rainer Maria Rilke — Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final

• Walt Whitman — Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.

Find Rachelle: rachellelamb.com

He always. She never. I can't trust you anymore. These aren't simply complaints; they are the architecture of a story. And the degree to which a couple is committed to that story is, in Rachelle's experience, very close to the degree to which the couple suffers inside it.

In this episode, Rachelle explores one of the most consistent patterns she encounters in couples work: the pull toward generalization, and what it costs. When two people become entrenched in the narrative of their relationship, they lose contact with the actual relationship; the living, present-moment aliveness unfolding between them right now. She looks at why the story feels safer than specificity, what the move toward genuine presence requires, and what becomes possible when two people are willing, even briefly, to step out of the narrative and encounter each other directly. The episode touches on Rumi's field beyond right-doing and wrong-doing, and the difference between a conversation that ends in threat and one that ends in acknowledgment. It closes with a blessing by Irish poet John O'Donohue For Love in a Time of Conflict from his collection To Bless the Space Between Us.

Referenced in this episode: Rumi, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.” John O'Donohue For Love in a Time of Conflict, from To Bless the Space Between Us (2008)

Find Rachelle: rachellelamb.com

After two years, Rachelle returns to revisit the foundations of Nonviolent Communication.

What Nonviolent Communication Was Meant to Be, and What It’s Become

Beginning with the opening page of Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall Rosenberg, this episode centers on two defining questions:

• What disconnects us from our compassionate nature?
• What allows us to remain connected to it, even under the most trying circumstances?

From there, this episode explores how Nonviolent Communication is often criticized as ineffective, overly focused on feelings, or disconnected from reality.

Drawing on the example of Etty Hillesum, this conversation points to a form of compassion that is not sentimental, but grounded, discerning, and rooted in a wider understanding of the human condition.

This marks the beginning of a broader exploration into relationships, culture, and what it means to relate, not only from personal needs, but in response to life itself.

If you’d like to stay connected and hear about future episodes, writings, and offerings, you’re welcome to join my mailing list:
https://www.rachellelamb.com